


500 Days of summer

by Classiccars



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-01
Updated: 2014-12-01
Packaged: 2018-02-27 19:06:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2703152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Classiccars/pseuds/Classiccars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day I met him, it was raining. Initially, it was even hailing hastily and making the insides of my car sound like a dryer tumbling with a ton of dried beans inside. It's a thought-through metaphor as well because on this specific day I felt more like a wet sock than I'd ever before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	500 Days of summer

Day 1

The day I met him, it was raining. Initially, it was even hailing hastily and making the insides of my car sound like a dryer tumbling with a ton of dried beans inside. It's a thought-through metaphor as well because on this specific day I felt more like a wet sock than I'd ever before.  
The entire day had just been kind of shitty. First, there was the trouble with my alarm not going off- my phone unplugged itself during nighttime and it seemed it had drained itself of power during whatever night activities an iPhone can be up to and so I was twenty minutes late. Having to skip morning shower and breakfast had me both gross and grumpy and generally, anyone's day starting off like this would've been bad.  
My first class was very bad as well. Forgetting my homework on the desk at home because I had to hurry a ton getting out the door, my teacher, mrs. Flitchwood, didn't believe my excuse the first time it had actually been truthful.  
So despite spending a few days and my entire supply of cappuccino mix I failed government class and failed to succeed in life at its most basic level. 

Rest of school day went like a book you've already read. So when I was on my way to pick up some groceries for ma, I felt relieved for the days stress and shitty-ness. I didn't expect the day to not be over yet at all. This was my stop, rest of lightened hours spend on my stomach in my comfortable queen sized bed. 

Now is when I meet him. 

I have always been comforted by the thought that one day, I would find my one true love, and my life would come together in peaceful harmony and joy and everything would be as it should. Kind of unrealistic, but my hopes and dreams had yet to be burst here. 

He did not share those beliefs. 

His name was Zayn. His hair was raven black and smoothed up like a skiing loop, his eyes a deep chocolate brown that was the biggest, and heaviest surrounded by tons of thick, unrealistically black eyelashes. He had a jawline sharp enough to cut diamonds and a look on his pretty perfect features like life was boring him to death.  
My mum would've called him a punk.  
I wanted to call him beautiful. 

And how would I know this was the moment that changed it all, you might ask?

I'll tell you. 

Since this day, my life was hit by what I would like to call the Zayn-effect. The days he was on the bus, it arrived just two minutes earlier at my stop, so that I could make it to my next bus without having to wait ten minutes in the unforgiving English weather. 

The day he was in my class, I got a straight set of B's on my biology test. (A subject of which a C would have been incredibly welcomed.)

My lost shoe wasn't lost anymore when I came home that day.  
My broken computer turned on when I tried it. 

Mind you, this was all before I _actually_ met him. 

Day 13

I took a deep breath of the fresh air, while I still could, before entering a big Amusement park located in the very heart of the busy city that is London.  
In the very moment I did so, the air filled with a smell of heavy popcorny, sugary goodness, and the sound of high-pitched screams in patterns almost like a melody as the rollercoaster slid around in the air and threw around people like they were passengers on their very last ride.  
I took another breath, my eyes scanning around the entrance. I'd brought the amount of tickets me and, my DATE, had agreed on.  
As I located the date, the date smiled and waved and made his way slowly and surely over to greet me whilst attempting not to be hit by any strangers or overly excited children.  
He was dressed in a petticoat and jeans that were right around his calves, a scarf which the small wind rustled and it seemed to annoy him, because several times his hand flew up to keep it down against his chest.  
I felt the smile tear my face the second the end of the black scarf blew up and smacked him directly in the face, and he sorta just gave up and grumbled a hello to me from behind the cotton fabric and I was laughing a bit as I greeted him back and attempted to save him from the fate of being strangled by a piece of cloth.  
"I'm so excited," I admitted to, my eyes searing over Zayn as he looked up and offered me a soft smile. It was really like he saw something in me that I didn't, because he looked like he was viewing an art piece in a museum and not my frostbitten face.  
"Me too," he answered, shifting his weight from one feet to another, and apparently this was the cue to start walking into the crowded place. 

The two of us decided on trying out that screamy rollercoaster first. And after a bit of vomiting, we could easily agree on trying something a little less screamy and gut-turning.  
We tried the tea cups.  
And since both of us were still a bit dizzy, it wasn't until our second ride we competed on who of us could get the cup spinning fastest on turns.  
After that, Zayn wanted to try out the shooting games.  
"Alright, you just knock yourselves out," said a rather obese man as he handed us a rifle each.  
I fumbled a bit with mine and were pretty sure Zayn was doing the same, until I decided to give him a look.  
The sight were a bit different.  
Zayn was standing absolutely concentrated, perfect posture and finger resting on the trigger.  
He exhaled before he pulled it off, shooting whatever thing was in that thing all over the round and round and round and dot thing, and hit almost directly in the center.  
A few shots more, and it was down.  
The fat man was occupied with talking to another fat man, and I handed Zayn my rifle.  
"No man you should try yourself it's fun," but I shook my head and forced the rifle to Zayn.  
"I want the big one." I nodded towards a first place prize, a big panda, and smiled with my eyebrows raised to Zayn.  
"Alright. You shall have that one then," he chuckled as he added the last, standing back and aiming all over again with my rifle.  
It weren't because I really wanted the large stuffed toy I gave up my turn, it was more just to watch Zayn shoot again.  
And the fat man looked choked when he turned around again, and Zayn with his timidly proud face and even prouder me by his side pointed to and claimed my Panda prize.  
"Here," He said with a small chuckle in his voice as I took the teddy bear from him and petted it.  
"Thank you," I said, smiling, walking off to try something else.

At last, we found ourselves with nothing left to try but the paddle boats, and two tickets left. 

"Well, old boy," I said, throwing the arm which didnt hold the panda around Zayn's shoulders. Although this were our first day and the touchy-touchy subject hadn't been brought up and the barrier between my body and his hadn't been broken yet, he didn't seem at all uncomfortable by the gesture. 

"Are we gon' go for the ideal love-story date ride?"

Zayn laughed. "I think we are."

Because Zayn already found himself in the position of big strong male and had already won me something nice, he was determined that I should paddle the hardest and he could relax a bit.  
"You are an ass." I said jokingly, but put some more strength into it.  
"Shut up and power the Swan."

 

Day 290

"Ayurnamat," Zayn said, popping a fresh green grape into his mouth. It didn't seem to satisfy him, as he reached over for a chip almost immediately after.  
"Gesundheit?" I said, confusion clouding my voice to the extent where I could feel myself sounding ridiculous.  
Zayn held the Xbox controller tightly in his hand. It was a wonder how he could be excessively stuffing his face with sour cream and onion chips and still keep a massive lead on the pixelated competing football teams on the screen of his television.  
"Ayurnamat," he repeated, chip spewing out his mouth. That wasn't quite as charming. I didn't mind, though. In reality, I'd probably lick those up from the floor if I had to.  
I was still as confused as I'd been first time he uttered the strange word. It was unfamiliar to me, but the way Zayn said it had me wondering if I had somehow managed to just miss the most trivial word of my own language ever.  
"'The philosophy that there is no point in worrying about events that cannot be changed,'" Harry enlightened him from his spot on the floor. His tongue was caught between his lips and he looked uttermost concentrated on not losing too hard to Zayn.  
"Oh." I said. 

"The philosophy that there is no point in worrying about my sickness or fate; it cannot be changed."

 

Day 367

He held the book up to his face to have his eyes search over the pages and decoding the symbols printed there, black on faxed white. The book he'd read over and over again during the past couple of years was one of his favorites. When you surpassed page 30 you'd come across a pattern of dots in the upper right corner, marking the opposite side after being closed tightly so there was a faded one to match in the left corner. The ink had dried in an almost perfect circle and yet left a imperfect mark on the opposite paper. It'd always held a misprint since purchased, and Zayn had a strong feeling that was a massive part of why he enjoyed the book so greatly.  
It wasn't that _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban_ was an explicit piece of literature. There was something about the familiar characters and familiar plot line that felt comforting to him.  
The sense of the story developing so hectically, it was written for people not yet knowing what was about to happen, but Zayn did. Zayn did know. Provided him with a sense of enlightenment he hadn't felt to his own situation for a long, long time. 

He's glancing at the door when he hears distant footsteps walking past it. They're light and hurried, so he suspects its a woman. She doesn't open Zayn's door, just goes right passed it. Zayn doesn't remember when hearing someone walking the hallway outside his assigned room became a sensation that had him leave off an unfinished sentence in his book. When he breathed out in an exhausted sigh, his ribs ached. Or, he guessed it wasn't his ribs. His lungs ached. 

 

Day 200

The air in the claustrophobically small square room was almost strangling. When they say you can cut the tension with a knife in here, it's often not meant to express the fact that one cannot breathe because literally, whatever is pressed in there is strangling you and you could _cut_ it if you tried, but this was how it felt.  
Zayn had been in this room for a few days, and he was still strapped to the bed by a series of transparent tubes going from his body to a number of containers with more transparent stuff in if. Some liquid, some not. 

This should hint me to the fact something is completely utterly and horribly wrong, yet I couldn't possibly brace myself for what Zayn is about to say next. 

"It's cancer."

I lose my breath. 

"It's stage two."

My bones are dangerously close to just combust on themselves.

"And its terminal."

 

Day 200 (but a few hours later)

I was in another room, now. My parents were there as well. I thought Zayn's parents called them to be there.  
Zayn weren't actually present.  
Doctors were discussing the future of him with both our parties of guardians. 

I wanted to pop my earbuds in and turn the sound up so loud I wouldn't be able to hear their conversation. I didn't wanted to hear anything at all; I just wanted to turn up the sound of absolutely nothing, while I tried to suppress the information just given to me, like forcing the heartache out of my chest and into like, the liver, or something. Preferably the second kidney I didn't have.

But there was no escape from this. Honestly, when was there ever any escape from terminal illness. 

Day 201-204

I spend a couple of days crying. And screaming. And wishing this wasn't happening to him. 

 

Day 153

I could feel the warmth of his skin radiate through the cotton fabric of his blouse and onto mine. He was warm. It was just one of those things he was. He was like summer, warm, comforting- and like the season, I found that I took a liking to him above all others of his kind. We were sitting side by side from each other on his couch by his dad's house. We had been watching the lottery for a while.  
As we'd come about five minutes into the TV show which, wasn't as entertaining as the nice lady hosting it was trying to make it out to be, I grew bored. Zayn noticed.  
He scooted lightly closer to me, his head tilted down to rest over my shoulder and the back of his head felt fuzzy and soft from his hair even through my shirt.  
"What'd you do with the money?" He asked. I'd been too into the numbers called aloud to pay attention, so I had to ask. "Huh?"

"If you won, what'd you do?" 

I thought for a long while. The regulars popped into my mind at first- new phone, new clothes, a car, a house. Maybe a small castle, even. But Zayn was the kind of person that deserved a better answer. He expected it too, I think. He was eyeing me with his eyebrows raised, and I felt like this was sort of a test. I passed if my answer was acceptable.  
"I think I'd save them," I declared. I realized how boring it sounded when Zayn raised his other eyebrow.  
"I mean, save them for when I needed them. Like, for a big wedding, some day." I explained further. I could feel my voice had grown wary, like I had to justify my reply. Save it, maybe.  
"I think I'd donate some to charity as well," I added, after a bit more thinking under Zayn's chocolate brown eyes piercing through me. When he stared at me like that I could feel it under my skin. Like small thunders breaking through my bones.  
It looked as though my answer had been accepted. Zayn nodded slowly, an 'hmm' sound emerging from the back of his throat like he was considering. 

"What'd you do, if you won?" 

Zayn got this kind of very thoughtful expression over his sharp features. His cheekbones were cut so high.. I was kinda just drifting off looking at him, I realized. Probably anyone else would've gotten impatient from the time it took Zayn to pick an option. 

"I'd buy my mum a house."

 

Day 467

Zayn were crying. His eyes were puffy and red and drowned in tears not yet fallen, his throat tied with unspoken sobbing, maybe even yelling. He was choking back everything the body reacted with when it contained so much sad, it had to let it out.  
I reached out to grab his hand. Of course there were days like this. Days where there was no use in being brave. Days where you just cried, and then continued hoping and fighting the next day over.  
"It's okay." I told him. My voice was strained and weak, like I was on the edge of crying as well. Which I was. It was a natural, instinctive kind of reaction I'd gotten used to over the last couple of months. Seeing Zayns eyes water up caused my own to follow close after, which I kind of hated myself for. I wanted to be strong for him. Be his rock. Be a steady pillar that he wouldn't cause to cry if he did himself. 

However, Zayn couldn't save me from crying today. 

He broke down, tears streaming down his face and leaving small trails over the pale of his sickened skin. Once so tan and beautiful, it was now about as white as the sheets he was laid upon.  
He choked on his breathing and I had to move over to pat his back, trying to get his malfunctioning lungs to extend in a rhythmical pattern instead of the sharp inhales of hyperventilated breaths it was producing now.  
Zayn cried out until he was shaking with exhaustion. He had his face buried in my shirt. My arms was around his shoulders. 

"I wanted to buy her a house," he sniffled, sounding as broken and dying as only a boy actually dying could. 

 

Day 160

The sound of Zayn's boots thudding the plastic floor beside me is driving me nuts, because it is evidence he is _right there_. I could touch him if I reached out and tried to. He may be my official boyfriend now, but its still difficult to handle public situations. Like taking his hand in the crowded hallways of the school.  
People is flooring out the classrooms to the chiming of the first bell, all coming towards the two of us like dead fish following the stream whilst Zayn and I are very much alive and terrified to be stomped to death.  
Well, theoretically that may be true- in reality, we just don't wanna get bumped into. But I'm too caught up in the thump-thump-thump of Zayn's soles on the floor and so, I do not move out of the way when half the school'a population is coming towards me. 

Zayn, however, is not nearly as daft as me.  
He reaches out, _takes my hand_ , and pulls me out the side of the hallway to shield me from having a fate and ending my day's much like Mufasa. 

My heart is beating when he doesn't let go, he just smiles a bit and continues his road to his locker on the other side of the deathly group of high schoolers. 

 

Day 496

This day, I took Zayn outside.  
He was able to walk still, but I had to pull the device carrying the machine pumping oxygen in and out his lungs from the tubbins placed in his nostrils. We hadn't gotten long outside and we hadn't even neared the park when the first children began asking their parents what the weird tube things in that boys' nose was.  
Zayn didn't react on it, so neither did I. I didn't know if I expected any less from Zayn.

Today was an especially beautiful day. Snow was melting all around us and bathing the streets in a thin layer of water the evening sky reflected itself in. The lights from inside the windows of the old buildings and houses all around made the ground seem like the sky; lit up by man-made stars at the size of the sun.  
It was very beautiful, but Zayn was only staring ahead.  
Behind us the wheels of the oxygen tank left the water unsteady and left a track our boot-clad feet couldn't. 

I was used to Zayn's expressionlessness by now. Too familiar with the way his face was drained from all color and all emotion, the way he looked like an empty shell, a painting in glorious 3D and matted colors. 

"Don't you think it's beautiful?" I asked him, in a wary attempt of trying to get him to look down; up, to the side, anywhere where his eyes could meet a little bit of the beauty the world he was in the middle of abruptly getting ridden of held, but didn't succeed.  
Instead, he looked at me. And he didn't have to verbally utter the word 'no', because his face told me all I had to know about his impression of the outside London on a cold evening in the near-spring. 

 

Day 497

I left for the yearly football tournament in Holmes Chapel this day. Zayn knew about it. I'd told him.  
Of course I should've wanted to not leave his side one single day of what could quite possibly be the last for him. But I was excited about spending time with people who were less dying than him.  
And that was an unintentionally cruel thought, but those living would never understand those dying fully.  
So I left, with my bag packed and joy filling my chest because I was just so excited for this. I went to tell Zayn goodbye before taking the bus with the other players, but he was asleep when I got there. 

The nurse told me there was a note left for me she wanted me to take home and read sometime. I stuffed it in the pocket of my jeans and went home. 

Changing into my footie gear made me feel incredibly more excited. I could bounce around in pure anticipation like a child, but I was freed from that feeling because Louis was soon at my doorstep for picking me up in his mother's car. She'd drive us to the bus stop where the rest of our team would be waiting on us. 

 

Day 498

We won, and I was so, so happy. 

 

Day 499

When I got home, my mum and dad was standing in the doorway with Union Jack waving about their faces like they were silently cheering and my mum hugged me, my dad patted my head and told me he was proud of me. It was probably one of the proudest moments in my life because I didn't really seem to ever accomplish anything. 

I was completely exhausted after training and playing for two days straight, and all I needed was a shower and a day or two of pure sleep. Taking a shower, I praised The Lord for the fact my family had unlimited warm water. 

I saw the note on my desk neatly folded as soon as I stepped back inside my room. It felt like a punch to the gut and I involuntarily lost my air for all the time it took me to walk over there and desperately clutching it in my hands. I didn't know how I could forget it. I simply couldn't.  
The few days with the team and during the tournament had been so wonderfully filled with _life_ to replace how dead everything had felt around me, even before it died, and it'd been so nice I had entirely neglected what I left behind.  
I was struggling to breathe when I unfolded it. It was like the oxygen had to go through a very long and complicated maze to reach my lungs, and in most cases it didn't succeed. 

In the letter wrote in beautifully cursive letters read;  
' _Dear Liam.  
The world is a beautiful place, and I am no longer afraid of dying._ '

 

Day 500

Zain Javadd Malik dies on the 22th of February, a day where the air stood still and the entire surface of earth was expecting rain, but didn't get it. I didn't get to see him.  
I got the phone call 3 o'clock at night. When I saw Zayn's father's caller ID my heart dropped to the bottom of my stomach.  
I knew it was now.  
And the couple of seconds passing between me waking up to me answering the call, the world felt visibly less meaningful. And my heart more than just a little more empty.

The conversation itself was a sorrowful affair. Mr. Malik was sniffling in the end of the line as he told me about when they found him, assured me he was good and he'd passed painlessly. Which I obviously knew was a lie, for the pain it felt to die had been stretched over the course of multiple months for Zayn. 

 

Day 504 (four days over time)

The funeral was beautiful. 

When I arrived in the suit Zayn and I had picked out for me to wear to this specific day, mr. Malik stood ready to welcome me. He took me on a small walk outside the building and began telling me that Muslims believe that death is a departure from the life of this world, but not the end of a person's existence. Rather, eternal life is to come, and they pray for God's mercy to be with the departed, in hopes that they may find peace and happiness in the life to come.  
It filled me with a sense of being hopeful. It was a beautiful philosophy. 

I think traditionally, only men is allowed to the gravesite when the burial takes place. At least this is what I've heard and read, but for Zayn's, everyone was allowed around the hole in the ground. I was standing as one of the people the farthest away. It's not that I didn't want to be close to him, but a funeral is for the living and for family, and in the moment I felt like neither. 

I didn't stay around to the reception. I couldn't. My air had collected itself and balled into something in the middle of my throat I couldn't breathe passed. I had to go home, because I couldn't cry in front of Zayn's family where every male was fighting back tears, even the ones who'd been the closest to him. I really didn't want to be the first to bawl my eyes out. 

My mom were waiting out by the car. I had no idea for how long she'd be waiting there, but I don't think I had ever been as happy to see her face as I was then. She caught me in her arms and provided me with a feeling of comfort only a mother could give with so short notice. 

And then I cried for three days on end. 

 

Day 1029. 

I still miss him every day.  
But I'm beginning to understand what Zayn meant in the note he wrote me.  
I know now that the world is a beautiful place, and I've never been less afraid to die.

**Author's Note:**

> im sorry
> 
> Heavily referenced to the movie with the same name. Though none of the characters in this work is cool enough to listen to The Smiths


End file.
